As electronic mail, or email, has become widespread, more and more organizations are relying on email for the bulk of their intra-organizational communications. As many organizations are organized hierarchically, it is useful to have the capability to send emails not only to individuals in the organizations, but to groups of individuals who make up sub-organizations within the hierarchy. This function may be performed by the use of mailing lists that include the appropriate individuals. Likewise, access to such information may be controlled by the use of access lists. However, information relating to the structure of the hierarchy, including the sub-organizations of the hierarchy and the included individuals, is typically kept in an organizational chart, or org-chart, which is separate from the mailing lists or access lists. When changes are made to the organization, whether changes in the individuals or changes in the structure of the hierarchy, these changes must be made to the org-chart and must also be reflected in the mailing lists and access lists. Currently, this requires manual updates to be made to the mailing lists and access lists. This manual updating is labor-intensive, time consuming, and expensive. A need arises for a technique by which changes in an organization can be automatically reflected in the organization's mailing lists and access lists.